Objectives
The welfare state has long been a subject of political struggle and debate. The character and politics of these struggles, however, has changed substantially over time. In contrast to the post-war period, over the last three decades, tighter budgets, maturing welfare commitments, and changing demographics have placed new demands on policymakers. At the same time, the interests and mobilization of voters, and organized groups, have dramatically changed. What characterizes the contemporary politics of the welfare state?

This seminar provides an introduction to three major topics in the study of welfare state reform: a) trends in entitlement and delivery of core benefits across OECD countries b) the preferences of voters (and non-voters) over social policy c) the interplay among voters, organized groups and policymakers in welfare state reform.

The first section of the course reviews work on policy change in four major areas: pensions, health, labour markets, and family policy. In each domain, many states have substantially altered benefits, however, these reforms have not amounted to either straightforward retrenchment or growth of the state. Instead, we will examine the distributional consequences of changes in the state for different categories of citizens, examining the varying constellations of change packages.

The second part of the course turns from policy changes to the political terrain around policy reform, investigating growing literature on preferences towards social policy. In era of changing social policy, many argue that understanding what voters want, why, and when, is crucial to understanding reform dynamics. This section of the course looks to map the nature of new economic cleavages over social policy, investigating a growing political economy literature on risk, gender, age, trade exposure, immigration, asset ownership, and employment environment, on policy preferences. We then ask whether these potential cleavages emerge as actual cleavages in political life, examining differences across contexts in the mobilization of economic cleavages.

The final part of the course asks to what extent governments actually respond to new demands in policy reform. This section briefly reviews classic theories of social policy making – which tend to emphasize organized groups and political parties rather than voter preferences per se – and then returns to more contemporary approaches. We examine the evidence for differential responsiveness of groups of voters (e.g. upper and lower income voters) and interest groups in policy reform.

Course plan overview

DAY 1: The origins of the welfare state: varying politics, varying states?

What do welfare states do? How do they vary?

The politics of the welfare state – what can the origins of the welfare state teach us about contemporary welfare politics?

DAY 2: How have welfare states changed?

What’s changed in coverage ‘old’ social risks? What hasn’t?

The rise of a ‘social investment’ state?

DAY 3: What do citizens want from social policy?

Demand for welfare – where does it come from?

Demand for welfare – preferences in context?

DAY 4: Aggregating Interests? Parties and Interest Groups in new welfare states

Do political parties still matter?

Unions, Employers and Financiers – A new interest group politics?

DAY 5: Matching demand and supply and welfare policy

Policy responsiveness and welfare politics: who is listening to whom?

Concluding thoughts on the new welfare politics

COURSE PLAN

Day 1: The origins of the welfare state: varying politics, varying states?
In the first day we start by reviewing classic arguments about the nature and origins of the welfare state. These lectures will provide an introduction to theorization of the origins of the welfare state, offering an entry point into current debates about pathways to change. The two lectures will provide a series of conceptual and empirical metrics for understanding the distributive structure of the welfare state and classic arguments about its politics allowing us to analyse the scope of change.

As background, you may also be interested in Jane Gingrich. 2015. “Coalitions, policies, and distribution: Esping-Andersen’s three worlds of welfare capitalism” in James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen. Advances in Comparative Historical Analysis. Cambridge University Press. P. 58-87.

Isabella Mares. 2001 “Firms and the Welfare State: When, Why and How Does Social Policy Matter to Employers?” in Varieties of Capitalism. Hall and Soskice. Chapter 5, p. 184-212. (26 pages)

Cybelle Fox. 2014. Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and the American Welfare State from the Progressive Era to the New Deal. Princeton University Press. P. 1-18. (17 pages)

Kimberly Morgan. 2006. Working mothers and the welfare state: Religion and the politics of work-family policies in Western Europe and the United States. Stanford University Press.. P. 1-31. (30 pages)

DAY 2: How have welfare states changed?
We begin by examining the trajectory of classic social programs looking at two questions. First, to what extent do we see changes in the structure of pensions, unemployment, and health insurance across OECD countries? Second, to what extent do these programs continue to play the same role in hedging against labor market and social risks as in the past. In so doing, we examine the interaction between reform trajectories and the changing nature of the labour market itself.

In the second session, we move from the question of ‘old social risks’ to new social risks, examining the introduction of programs aimed at dealing with traditionally neglected groups – the young, lone parents, women and migrants. In this session we ask both what have welfare states done in regard to new social risks and why. In particular, we ask why some countries appear to have adopted more extensive policies of “social investment” than others.

Day 3: What do citizens want from social policy?
In the first lecture, we work through several “workhorse” approaches to understanding citizens’ demand for social programs: reviewing theoretical debates about both the demand for redistribution and the demand for insurance, empirical debates over the predictions in this literature, and more recent work attempting to theorize non-material motives for preferences.

In the second lecture, we examine the idea that people live inside a political context that can modify their demands. We start by thinking about the context in material terms, how does the structure of programs shape the a) what citizens and b) their willingness to mobilize. We then look at two other components of the context – the informational context and the discursive context – asking how both the information citizens have about politics and the language of politics matters.

Note: The following pieces form core background arguments to the contemporary political economy debate. Iversen discusses them in his text, and we will cover the basic logic in the lecture, but you may wish to read the original models.

Alan Meltzer and Scott Richard. 1981. A rational theory of the size of government. Journal of Public Economics. 89 (5).

Charlotte Cavaille and Kris-Stella Trump. 2015. The Two Facets of Social Policy Preferences. Journal of Politics. 77:1. 146-160 (14 pages)

Day 4: Organized Actors – Parties and Interest groups
We begin by turning from the diffuse preferences of citizens to the expression of political demands through party competition. We examine debates about how to understand the positions parties take on social policy and redistribution - do parties select policies to maximize votes, appeal to traditional constituents, achieve ideological goals? We then place these questions in a changing context, looking at the shifting class basis of voting, new policy cleavages, and changing constraints on governments.

In the second lecture, we turn from parties to interest groups, particularly, the changing role of union and employer wage bargaining. We look at debates about how the changing coverage of bargaining, structure of union membership, and the rise of non-unionized jobs have altered the position of unions vis-à-vis the welfare states. We then turn to claims about growing business and financial interests in welfare state reform, asking how far these dynamics hold outside the United States.

Lecture 7: Do political parties still matter?

Changing social base for parties

Changing constraints on policy

Interaction with the socio=economic structure

Political accountability

Lecture 8: Unions, Employers and Financiers – A new interest group politics?

Corporatism and the welfare state

Changing union demands? Employer demands?

Finance as a new player?

Literature:

Jane Gingrich and Silja Hausermann. 2015.The decline of the working-class vote, the reconfiguration of the welfare support coalition and consequences for the welfare state. Journal of European Social Policy. 25, 1: 50-75. (25 pages).

Boix, Carles. 1998. Political parties, growth and equality: conservative and social democratic economic strategies in the world economy. Cambridge University Press. Introduction and Chapter 1. Pp. 1-50 (49 pages)

Torben Iversen and David Soskice. 2006. “Electoral Systems and the Politics of Coalitions: Why Some Democracies Redistribute More than Others,” American Political Science Review 100: 165-81. (16 Pages)

David Rueda. 2005. “Insider–outsider politics in industrialized democracies: the challenge to social democratic parties.” American Political Science Review. 99 (1), 61-74 (13 pages)

John Stephens. 2015. “Revisiting Pierson’s Work on the Politics of Welfare State Reform in the Era of Retrenchment Twenty Years Later.“ PS. April 2015. 274-278. (4 pages)

Kathleen Thelen. 2014. Varieties of liberalization and the new politics of social solidarity. Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1. Pp. 1-32. (31 pages)

Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson. 2010. “Winner-take-all politics: Public policy, political organization, and the precipitous rise of top incomes in the United States.” Politics and Society. 38:2. 152-204. (52 pages).

Day 5: Matching demand and supply and welfare policy
In our penultimate session, we turn to the question of responsiveness. begin moving from the “demand” side of welfare policies (the preferences of the electorate) to the “supply” side of policies,

The final lecture of the course is a little more speculative, drawing on newer literature asking whether the changes in the welfare state have fed back into lower trust, changed demands on it etc.

Hacker, Jacob. 2004. "Privatizing Risk without Privatizing the Welfare State: The Hidden Politics of Social Policy Retrenchment in the United States." American Political Science Review 98 (02): 243-60. (17 pages)

Wolfgang Streeck and Daniel Mertens 2013. “Public Finance and the Decline of State Capacity in Democratic Capitalism” Politics in the Age of Austerity. Eds. Wolfgang Streeck and Armin Schaefer. Wiley. 26-58. (32 pages)

Background and Additional Resources
You may want to familiarize yourself with some conventional measures on welfare spending, entitlement and outcomes. These databases are invaluable resources for research.

International Social Survey Programme (ISSP)
http://www.gesis.org/en/issp/home/

European Values Survey
http://www.europeanvaluesstudy.eu

World Values Survey
http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/wvs.jsp

Comparative Study of Electoral Systems
http://www.cses.org

The Lecturer
Jane Gingrich is Associate Professor of Comparative Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests involve comparative political economy and comparative social policy. In particular, she is interested in contemporary restructuring of the welfare state, and the politics of institutional change more broadly.